Mann of the hour -- ACT lifts curtain on its 40th year, with 'Death in Venice'

Jessica Werner Zack, Special to The Chronicle

Published
4:00 am PDT, Saturday, September 9, 2006

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SHOWN: Giles Havergal rehearsing his one man show, "Death in Venice" at the rehearsal studio for ACT on Grant St. These photos shot on Thursday, Aug. 31, 2006, in San Francisco, CA.
(Katy Raddatz/The S.F.Chronicle)
**Giles Havergal Mandatory credit for photographer and the San Francisco Chronicle/ -Mags out less

HAVERGAL_048_RAD.jpg
SHOWN: Giles Havergal rehearsing his one man show, "Death in Venice" at the rehearsal studio for ACT on Grant St. These photos shot on Thursday, Aug. 31, 2006, in San Francisco, CA.
(Katy ... more

Photo: Katy Raddatz

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HAVERGAL_048_RAD.jpg
SHOWN: Giles Havergal rehearsing his one man show, "Death in Venice" at the rehearsal studio for ACT on Grant St. These photos shot on Thursday, Aug. 31, 2006, in San Francisco, CA.
(Katy Raddatz/The S.F.Chronicle)
**Giles Havergal Mandatory credit for photographer and the San Francisco Chronicle/ -Mags out less

HAVERGAL_048_RAD.jpg
SHOWN: Giles Havergal rehearsing his one man show, "Death in Venice" at the rehearsal studio for ACT on Grant St. These photos shot on Thursday, Aug. 31, 2006, in San Francisco, CA.
(Katy ... more

Photo: Katy Raddatz

Mann of the hour -- ACT lifts curtain on its 40th year, with 'Death in Venice'

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During a midmorning rehearsal break in one of American Conservatory Theater's Grant Avenue studios, Giles Havergal folds his tall, lanky frame into a chair and sets down his well-thumbed script of "Death in Venice." He chooses his words carefully to convey his enthusiasm for transforming Thomas Mann's tragic, erotically charged 1912 novella of forbidden infatuation into a one-man play. "When you describe the story it sounds extremely unsuitable, even inappropriate," Havergal says in his gentle English accent. "And of course it is. But there is also something about this shattering story of a man's complete undoing that has made it a truly great novel, and makes it a story worth telling in theater terms."

He portrays Mann's semi-autobiographical narrator Gustav von Aschenbach, a famous -- and famously self-disciplined -- German writer who, on a Venetian holiday, psychologically unravels in the throes of his consuming desire for a 14-year-old Polish boy's "godlike beauty."

An actor, director and former artistic head (from 1969 to 2003) of Glasgow's much-admired Citizens' Theatre, Havergal has become increasingly well known locally for his high-fidelity adaptations of literary classics from the page to the stage. In 1997, ACT Artistic Director Carey Perloff invited him to bring his award-winning staging of Graham Greene's "Travels with My Aunt" to San Francisco, which resulted in his ACT-commissioned versions of "The House of Mirth" (2000) and "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" (2003), both of which Havergal also directed.

"Death in Venice," which opens tonight at Zeum Theater, is ACT's second co-production with Theatre Rhinoceros (following last season's repertory run of "Lilies"). Havergal agrees it is, in literary terms, a fitting start to ACT's 40th anniversary season, which officially opens next week with Tom Stoppard's "Travesties" at the Geary Theater. "When I started working (at ACT), I immediately warmed to the fact that some extraordinarily bold, unlikely play choices were being made here, under Carey's leadership," he says. "This was just what we tried to do at the Citizens' -- perform a repertoire of works we considered classics, and do them in quite unusual ways."

Havergal's trademark style of adaptation is to quite literally play it by the book. Every word of dialogue in his scripts is drawn from the original source. He believes that "all adaptation is amputation," and says that since everything from a book-length work can't be included onstage, his artfulness is in choosing and splicing wisely, not inserting his own lines as connective tissue. "I believe wonderful writing is not just wonderful in the general sense, but is wonderful in its particulars, in each phrase, in each placing of a word. Two bits of a sentence might be a paragraph apart and I put them together, but every word is Mann's" in this "Death in Venice," which he co-adapted eight years ago with fellow Citizens' director Robert David MacDonald (who died in 2004).

Havergal has distilled Mann's prose to chart his character's extreme psychological highs and lows. The narration ranges from von Aschenbach's subtle reflections on his career achievements to the florid, white-hot ravings of a restrained man confronting for the first time Eros' unleashed power.

"It is the story of a man who has sacrificed his emotional life, who has been devoted to capturing beauty through language, and when he sees the boy he is led to the discovery that beauty cannot just be aesthetic, but must also be visceral, physical."

That Mann pegs von Aschenbach's undoing to his taboo longing for a teen boy (who was in real life 10 when Mann saw him on the Lido beach) has led to the novel's reading, especially by post-Stonewall critics, as a book foremost about the author's own closeted homosexuality. Yet, scholars have also gone out of their way to read "Death in Venice" as Mann's allegory of aesthetics and creativity. Some of the most beautiful lines in Havergal's script are from Mann's imagined dialogue between Socrates and his student Phaedrus on the spiritual virtues of beauty itself.

Havergal says he avoided researching Mann's personal life in preparation for this role, even though much more has been known about the Nobel Prize winner's inner torment since the publication of his diaries in the '70s . "I didn't go down that route, I thought it just too complicated," says Havergal. "Really, you can't just relegate 'Death in Venice' and say it's a gay book. I think we can all sympathize with that moment when an edifice in one's life cracks open because of something forbidden."

Havergal is struck by the strong personal connection he has made with a project he remembers launching into on something of a whim. "We were discussing the playlist in Glasgow, a conversation we were always having, and (director) Philip (Prowse) said, 'You should do 'Death in Venice.' Funny enough, I felt instantly he was absolutely right. The way some important decisions are made on a four-second sentence, that was what happened."

Havergal created a spare production with few props, underscored by Berlioz, Shimanovsky and Varèse music and the rhythmic striking of typewriter keys. He premiered the play in 1999 in Scotland, followed by a run at Manhattan Ensemble Theater in 2002.

A stroke of Mann's genius was that, Havergal says, "he was just 36 when he wrote 'Death in Venice,' yet he gets inside the mind-set of a much older man." Havergal turned 60 in 1998, the year he revisited Mann's novella, which had "made a great impression" on him when he read it at university and again when Visconti's 1971 film version was released. "When you get to that age, you begin to think about the fact that you've spent your life doing one thing, and maybe there's another way of doing things. That is certainly personal."

Since retiring from his post at the Citizens', Havergal has been splitting his time between London and the United States. He is enjoying his new freelance life, "being offered more work than I can do," including his first TV roles in Britain. He has been asked to direct an Offenbach opera there next summer and will direct two productions with ACT's MFA students this spring.

Havergal says he's thrilled to be performing Mann's great novella in a city with San Francisco's gay audience, but he adds with a laugh, "there's another aspect to that. In this digital age, it's just wonderful to do 'Death in Venice' in a city that's heard of Thomas Mann."

"Death in Venice," based on the novel by Thomas Mann, adapted by Robert David MacDonald and Giles Havergal, translated by David Luke, directed and performed by Havergal. Runs through Sept. 24. Zeum Theater, Yerba Buena Gardens, Fourth and Howard streets, San Francisco. Tickets: $10-$25. (415) 749-2228,
www.act-sf.org
.